ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the “union view”–the ideas that love involve a kind of fusion of selves into one shared identity. This idea of love as fusion is baked into popular culture and elements of it inflect many of our ordinary life discussions, even if the specifics remain unstated. There are many other theories of love to engage with details of the views and they fit with the role that love plays in our lives. For many in the twenty-first-century West, those attitudes and commitments derive from ideas about love as a “union” or “merger:” love involves the melding together selves or at least the mutual adoption of desires and interests of the other. Robert Nozick says that a theory of love should be able to explain why a failure to trade up in love is not irrational–that is, what makes love unlike commodities and contractual exchanges.
